Hang around Los Santos long enough and you start to notice weird little details the devs clearly obsessed over, like how a character's flip-flop actually bends when they walk or the tiny ticking noise from a cooling engine, which makes spending and grinding for GTA 5 Money feel oddly worth it, but buried under all that realism there's this one huge thing that does not add up at all once you spot it.

Locked World, No Keys

The game treats cars in a really simple way: they are either locked or unlocked, nothing in between, and the idea that someone might have their own key for their own car just does not exist in the logic so the world acts like ownership is kind of fake, which is wild when you realise how many missions revolve around very specific vehicles.

Dave Norton Breaking Into Dave Norton's Car

The best example is Dave Norton, because you look at this guy and you think, yeah, he is the sort of person who would definitely carry a key fob, but when the script says his car is locked the game has no "legit" animation for him, no little moment where he taps a button or turns a key, so he does the only thing the AI knows how to do in that situation and just smashes his own window with his elbow, reaches in and pops the door like some random car thief, and if you watch it play out in a cutscene it feels like the game accidentally forgot who owns the vehicle.

How The System Fakes Ownership

Once you start paying attention you see the same pattern everywhere, because the engine is built around stealing cars not keeping them, so the animation library has hotwiring, dragging people out of seats, shoving doors open, but no "I live here, this is mine" motion, and that means the world quietly assumes people either never lock their cars or they are totally fine with blowing out a window every time they want to drive to a shop, which is hilarious when you think about how much effort went into reflections on bodywork and little things like the way tyres sag under weight.

What It Says About GTA's World

Players grind, trade and min-max every vehicle slot like they are building a proper collection, talking about personal garages and dream builds, but under the hood the game still treats every car as basically communal property that anybody can jump into as long as the state flips to "unlocked", and once you notice that nobody in Los Santos ever pulls out a key, not a main character, not a side character, not even background cops, it feels like the city runs on this unspoken rule that glass is cheaper than a keyring.

Living With The Glitchy Logic

After you see it, it is hard to unsee; you start laughing at scenes that are meant to be serious because you know the guy in the suit is about to headbutt his own window instead of pressing a button, and it kind of sums up GTA V as a whole, a game that nails tiny bits of realism but still lives in a cartoon world where nobody owns anything properly, even while we throw hours of grinding and stacks of cheap GTA 5 Money in RSVSR at trying to make these cars feel like they are really ours.